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Online Casino Gambling Hardly Simple Issue

Does the U.S. government’s position regarding online casino gambling represent an infringement on the civil rights of American citizens? There is nothing in the Constitution or Bill of Rights or the various other amendments to warrant the claim that the ability to gamble online is a guarantee enshrined in the Constitution, but neither is it entirely accurate to say that the Justice Department’s excuse that the 1961 Wire Act is applicable against online gambling, and thus online casino sites and operations are illegal. This is, after all, the government’s claim.

With online casino sites being increasingly accessed via cable internet rather than phone lines, the government’s claim that gambling over phone lines is illegal and thus online casino gambling is illegal just is no longer all that accurate. You can’t really charge someone with illegal gambling over phone lines if they do not do the gambling – on the world wide web – thanks to a phone connection linking them to the internet. To be fair, there are individual states which have passed specific laws banning online casino gambling however citizens or residents of a state connect to the web, but these are the exceptions to the rule rather than the national rule.

So it can be said, quite accurately, that the issue of online casino operations and usage in the United States is anything but black and white. There are a lot of status issues to be resolved that haven’t been resolved yet, and with the government having an even more attentive eye on citizens – often without their knowledge – privacy protection and online casino regulation become interlinked; how can the government claim online casino operators may be illegally spying on Americans when the American government itself might be doing the same thing? See, it gets complicated when you make the government uncomfortable. Even more so, for online gamblers, when the government makes them uncomfortable.